Ok, you have a good point and now I seem to finally understand what you mean.

It's not that this has been argued over and over only to get strong rejections as I was assuming. Seems I got confused yet again.

Apparently, the deal is that this has been long requested over and over, but all that ever came out of this was this possibility to have it as an external for Pd. Which is to say there was plenty awareness that people wanted it, but, nonetheless, a decision has been made by Miller and this is probably all we'll ever get. Am I close?

2017-10-21 5:08 GMT-02:00 IOhannes m zmölnig <zmoelnig@iem.at>:

1.5 years ago (see the post from miller that alex linked to) a decision
was made, which was greeted with an "EVERYONE WINS" by the community
(and i don't remember anybody objecting).

so what has changed in the last 20 months?

I don't think much has changed. But by that I mean a lot of people still seem to hope for that functionality in Vanilla and are still requesting for it. Yes making it possible for externals was obviously a well received step towards, unlikely subject to any objection by anybody, but I don't think that one or another person greeting "Yeah! Awesome" reflects the satisfaction of the whole community, or an agreement that actually having this in Vanilla from then on and forever would be crazy. Actually I can't see why there'd be much objection for not having this in Vanilla. Thus, still here we are asking for further solutions.

Ok, seems Miller has concerns. And I've already found my own solution (writting my own external), so I can let it go easily. Though I'm really curious and would like at least an explanation just to understand the issue.

2017-10-22 12:24 GMT-02:00 Dan Wilcox <danomatika@gmail.com>:

Maybe a further solution would be to have an optional [initbang] (or something similarly named) in the core "extra" externals which simply wraps the interface provided within vanilla and is overridable and/or optional when compiling.

I can think of an easier solution that doesn't even require another Pd object: [loadbang] could take a non zero argument to turn it into [initbang]. That'd be so easy to implement that even I could do it... (it's just action = LB_INIT instead of LB_LOAD). This would also be backwards compatible, of course. I could even go ahead and make a PR for that.

cheers